The main problem with Twilight isn’t its sparkly vampires who lack all traditional weaknesses, or even its anti-feminist sensibility. When you get right down to it, the trouble is that the writing is terrible, filled with cliche phrases (“smoldering eyes”), repeated words (294 “eyes” in 498 pages) and the reductive characterization of its main characters (Bella is clumsy, and I guess she likes books. Or something).

On a recent car-trip with my husband and the writer Chip Cheek, we mulled over the question: What if great literary writers of the last 200 years had penned Twilight instead?

My top favorites from the site include:

Herman Melville

“Call me Bella.” A tome about the length of the original series investigates Bella’s monomanical search for the vampire who stole her virginity. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the devastating whiteness of Edward’s skin, and several on the physiognomy of vampires, starting with their skeletal structure outward.

Virginia Woolf

The novel takes place over the course of twenty four hours, during which Bella is painting a portrait of Edward and reflecting on how her femininity circumscribes her role within 20th century society.

Cormac McCarthy

In the opening scene, Edward dashes Bella’s head against a rock and rapes her corpse. Then he and Jacob take off on an unexplained rampage through the West.

Jane Austen

Basically the same as the original, except that Bella is socially apt and incredibly witty. Her distrust of Edward is initially bourne out of a tragic misunderstanding of his character, but after a fling with Jacob during which he sexually assaults her (amusing to no one in this version) she and Edward live happily ever after.

Annie Proulx

Edward and Jacob defy society’s expectations up in the mountains.

Lewis Carroll

Bella takes acid and charts syllogisms.

James Joyce

Edward’s rapacious love for Bella reflects the way globalism has pillaged Ireland. It’s entirely written in Esperanto, with sections in untranslated Greek, except for Chapter 40, which is inexplicably rendered as a script page from the musical The Book of Mormon.

Dorothy Parker

Bella writes a brilliant takedown of the latest school play, dates a string of men, and repeatedly attempts suicide.

Kate Chopin

Stifled by her marriage to Edward, Bella has an affair with Jacob and then drowns herself.

Ernest Hemingway

Edward and Bella exchange terse dialogue alluding to Edward’s anatomical problem. Eventually, Bella leaves him for Jacob, a local bullfighter with a giant…sense of entitlement.

Ayn Rand

Edward tells Bella that he intends to stop saving her life, unless she starts paying him in gold bullion. Hatefucking ensues, then Jacob spouts objectivist philosophy for the next 100 pages.

Haruki Murakami: [Added by commenter Benk]

Bella has sex with Edward, who is half a ghost. Jacob is a talking cat. Most of the prose is given over to descriptions of Bella making pasta.

My addition:

Neil Gaiman

The story begins with a song. Then the song creates the world. Then major, minor and demi-gods appear. A hero’s journey in hell occurs, with Edward starring as the brooding, pissed off vampire who can’t drink blood because of a spell and must go to hell to break the spell. A duel of philosophical/existential dimensions ensue. Somebody gets swallowed up in a vagina. Edward saves the world by singing.

Terry Pratchett

The world is a flat disc on top of a turtle spinning on top of an elephant and Edward and Bella are on top of this world trying to save the world from witches and fairies and goblins and what-not.

George Lucas

Edward is Han Solo trying to save Princess Bella and Jacob Skywalker from the Evil Empire of Disapproving Vampires and Werewolves. A intergalactic civil war ensues. Vampires fly spaceships. Princess and Skywalker think they like each other, but realize they are related, so Edward gets the girl instead.

Ah, so many possible things could happen – if anyone but Stephanie Meyers wrote this series.